C- | A survivor of a family massacre revisits the case as an adult. Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner Starring Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Christina Hendricks Review by Jon Kissel |
For the cast of Dark Places, 2015 was a high water mark for several of their careers. Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult co-starred in perhaps the greatest action film ever made in Mad Max: Fury Road. Christina Hendricks was ending her run as Joan in the final season of Mad Men. Sean Bridgers, best known as Johnny Burns from Deadwood, co-starred in the best film on his resume in Room, though he memorably played an unconscionable dirtbag in it. Add in acclaimed young actors like Tye Sheridan and Chloe Moretz, plus the source material from Gillian Flynn one year after Gone Girl’s film adaptation and the pedigree of indie darling studio A24, and Dark Places should have been an easy layup for all involved. Instead, the leaden direction and writing from Gilles Paquet-Brenner takes these ingredients and turns them into one of those gray blobs from the Breath of the Wild game. One should never mix the prime steak of this cast with the assorted bag of monster parts that is Paquet-Brenner.
Theron stars as Libby Day, the sole survivor of a massacre that took the lives of her mother (Hendricks) and two sisters. As a young girl at the time, she testified against her brother Ben (Sheridan as a teen and Corey Stoll as an adult), and he was imprisoned based solely on her word. In the present day, Libby has been eclipsed by a steady stream of true-crime ‘celebrities’ and her income stream has dried up. She contacts the last person willing to pay her for her time as a survivor, Hoult’s Lyle Wirth, and gets mixed up with his club of true-crime voyeurs and investigators. They force Libby to reconsider the events of the past and reckon with the dawning likelihood that she unjustly sent her brother to jail.
Dark Places almost immediately loses me from its opening frames, and proceeds to lose me a few minutes later. Young Libby is introduced from the first-person view as she goes to her mom’s bedroom, and I think this is a fundamentally cheap way to create atmosphere and identify the viewer with the character. So is narration, which adult Libby is saddled with copious amounts. Where Dark Places demonstrates what it thinks of its viewer’s intelligence is when Theron first appears onscreen alongside the chyron of Adult Libby. Paquet-Brenner is digging himself a deep, deep hole within the first few minutes of his film. The story is that of a mystery, and that chyron is the level of sleuthing the viewer is being asked to do.
As regards characterization, things don’t get much better from there. Libby’s narration, droning on about how damaged and asocial she is, is slow-played by her actual actions, which largely seem perfectly reasonable for anyone, much less a witness to the deaths of her family. She is justifiably unnerved and angry by being brought to Wirth’s club, full of murderino’s dressed as various serial killers and victims, except for the top floor where all the serious people are. Why would Wirth have her, of all people, meet him there, except for the opportunity to showcase a dingy and complicated scene for Paquet-Brenner’s resume? In the case of young Ben, the film openly engages with the Satanic Panic that helped to put him away, but its version of complicating the character as more than a martyr is to make him an actual Satanist, or at least a knock-off of the public perception of one. He does do rituals, he does pray to Satan, and he does murder animals, to say nothing of his girlfriend, played by Moretz, who is even more Satan-y than he is and ultimately becomes a tribute to the dangers of…. Reefer Madness!. This is like suggesting there were real witches in Salem, or that Joe McCarthy was right but overzealous. Maybe I’m still basking in the afterglow of Hail Satan, but I’m not open to giving the fearmongers an inch, documentary or not.
More than anything, Dark Places infuriates with its getting off on withholding. Characters frequently know more than whoever they’re talking to, in the past and the present, they suggest as much, and then they just refuse to say anymore. This wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t tip it every time. Wirth knows more about the case than he’s willing to share with Libby. Ben’s hiding stuff from Libby she’s just not ready to know. Everyone knows more about Ben’s dad than he does, and everyone knows more about Ben’s alleged crimes than his mom does. Some of this is a weak attempt at building out the mystery and making several culprits seem possible (Moretz’s dad seemed a worthy possibility but he’s never onscreen despite how much she talks about him), but it’s the same attempt over and over again, and I can see the strings.
This is a bad movie. Paquet-Brenner was perhaps the worst choice to bring the source material to life, as he has no vision and no talent for adapting what was probably a narration-heavy book into a visual medium. I can’t even say the talented cast makes the best of a bad situation. Perhaps Hendricks elevates her role into something acceptable, and Stoll works pretty well as adult Ben, but the rest are flat and perfunctory. At the end of the day, I really hated that chyron. D+
Dark Places almost immediately loses me from its opening frames, and proceeds to lose me a few minutes later. Young Libby is introduced from the first-person view as she goes to her mom’s bedroom, and I think this is a fundamentally cheap way to create atmosphere and identify the viewer with the character. So is narration, which adult Libby is saddled with copious amounts. Where Dark Places demonstrates what it thinks of its viewer’s intelligence is when Theron first appears onscreen alongside the chyron of Adult Libby. Paquet-Brenner is digging himself a deep, deep hole within the first few minutes of his film. The story is that of a mystery, and that chyron is the level of sleuthing the viewer is being asked to do.
As regards characterization, things don’t get much better from there. Libby’s narration, droning on about how damaged and asocial she is, is slow-played by her actual actions, which largely seem perfectly reasonable for anyone, much less a witness to the deaths of her family. She is justifiably unnerved and angry by being brought to Wirth’s club, full of murderino’s dressed as various serial killers and victims, except for the top floor where all the serious people are. Why would Wirth have her, of all people, meet him there, except for the opportunity to showcase a dingy and complicated scene for Paquet-Brenner’s resume? In the case of young Ben, the film openly engages with the Satanic Panic that helped to put him away, but its version of complicating the character as more than a martyr is to make him an actual Satanist, or at least a knock-off of the public perception of one. He does do rituals, he does pray to Satan, and he does murder animals, to say nothing of his girlfriend, played by Moretz, who is even more Satan-y than he is and ultimately becomes a tribute to the dangers of…. Reefer Madness!. This is like suggesting there were real witches in Salem, or that Joe McCarthy was right but overzealous. Maybe I’m still basking in the afterglow of Hail Satan, but I’m not open to giving the fearmongers an inch, documentary or not.
More than anything, Dark Places infuriates with its getting off on withholding. Characters frequently know more than whoever they’re talking to, in the past and the present, they suggest as much, and then they just refuse to say anymore. This wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t tip it every time. Wirth knows more about the case than he’s willing to share with Libby. Ben’s hiding stuff from Libby she’s just not ready to know. Everyone knows more about Ben’s dad than he does, and everyone knows more about Ben’s alleged crimes than his mom does. Some of this is a weak attempt at building out the mystery and making several culprits seem possible (Moretz’s dad seemed a worthy possibility but he’s never onscreen despite how much she talks about him), but it’s the same attempt over and over again, and I can see the strings.
This is a bad movie. Paquet-Brenner was perhaps the worst choice to bring the source material to life, as he has no vision and no talent for adapting what was probably a narration-heavy book into a visual medium. I can’t even say the talented cast makes the best of a bad situation. Perhaps Hendricks elevates her role into something acceptable, and Stoll works pretty well as adult Ben, but the rest are flat and perfunctory. At the end of the day, I really hated that chyron. D+
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